


Plots and Schemes

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Attempt at Humor, F/M, Superheroes, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 06:12:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15527883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Mistress Lilit likes to think that she's one of the most feared supervillians out there, but when one of her plans goes awry and her most loyal henchman is the one to suffer for it, she's not quite sure what to do. Being the one who feels helpless is new to her and she doesn't like it one bit. Further complicating matters is that said henchman might have had plans of his own, ones that might no longer be feasible given the circumstances.





	Plots and Schemes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



> You asked for goofy so I tried to run with comic-book logic as I remember it working. Awesome prompt by the way, it fits your name very well.

“Stop sulking around like that!”

Nunzio paused to adjust his grip on the box he was carrying before stomping loudly past her.

Lilit closed her eyes and grimaced behind the mask she wore, “I said _sulking_ , not _skulking_.”

The hulking monstrosity, once her longest serving and most loyal henchman, grumbled something inaudible, layered fins around his neck and chest fluttering slightly.

“What was that?” She snapped, not bothering to look up from the museum floorplans she was looking over. They weren’t from one of her plans, possibly something that Nunzio had been plotting on his own.

Nunzio snorted and continued on his way, bone spines rattling against each other as he went.

Normally that was the sort of thing that resulted in swift and often messy punishment, but in the past taking care of that had been Nunzio’s responsibility as her right hand man and Lilit still hadn’t promoted anyone from the rank and file to take his place as her new second in command. Kurtz was showing a lot of ambition, but she hadn’t made up her mind if it was the kind of ambition to reward or ‘reward’.

The problem was that Nunzio hadn’t been himself lately and she knew exactly when it had started.

It was the incident at the marine research center when the blasted Bio-Accelerator had malfunctioned, or worked perfectly, she wasn’t sure which. She’d never been good with super-tech herself, so she’d outsourced the project to the Mechromancer. They’d worked together plenty of times in the past and he was easily one of the best mad scientists out there, even if he insisted on being called a ‘mad engineer’.

Looking back that might have been her first warning. He’d listened to her request for a device that could convert mundane animals to fearsome, but loyal monsters for her plan to hold the world’s major shipping lanes hostage, and suggested that maybe she look for a ‘mad biologist’ or possibly a sufficiently amoral geneticist with a grudge and a need for funding. Lilit didn’t know of any sufficiently unprincipled geneticists so of course that would have meant going to Echidna for help and she and the witch hadn’t been on the best of terms ever since the Nefarious Nine broke up. So she’d persisted, explaining to the Mechromancer that she wanted minions that would be loyal to her, not some crazy witch who seemed to think that going to a zoo and fusing random animals into chimerical monstrosities counted as an evil scheme. He’d relented and made the Bio-Accelerator for her.

And maybe it had been a bit of a rush job, squeezed in between his working on the Apocalypse Clock and yet another giant robot that he was sure would work to defeat whichever superhero he’d managed to draw the attention of this time once and for all. As good as he was at making doomsday devices, the Mechromancer tended to collect archrivals like some people collected priceless artifacts stolen from museums and replaced with cunningly made replicas. Likely he’d ended up with a whole team of heroes after him this time because the device he gave her wasn’t the traditional high-tech ray gun or even better, an ominous metal box with blinking lights like she’d been hoping for. Instead it was a little laser-pointer looking thing that you plugged into your smartphone and programmed with a specially installed app.

Possibly the Mechromancer had passed the project off to one of his interns. Still, the demonstration had been promising, turning an ordinary housecat into something with wings and far too many legs, so she’d taken it back to her lair and looked over the phonebook sized instruction manual.

After several hours of effort and managing to do little more than cause a rat to double in size she’d passed it off to Nunzio.

The man may have looked like an utter brute, but he was far more patient than she was, especially with finicky little things like that. He actually kept all the clocks in her lair displaying the same time, even the ones on the oven and the microwave, so she had no reason to doubt him.

He’d come through, just like he always did, managing to get the rat to grow to the size of a greyhound and sprout a mane of quills running from its head to the tip of its tail. All in all an impressive creature and he’d even managed to teach it a few tricks. The basics, sit, stay, roll over, kill, but still impressive for one night. Lilit had been impressed and figured that it was time to put the Bio-Accelerator to good use, or nefarious purposes, as the case was.

The exact details of what followed didn’t matter much, just that Undine, Protector of the Seas, had been at the marine research center as the guest of honor at a party celebrating the release of two porpoises that the center had recently finished rehabilitating.

Lilit had wasted no time taking a hostage to prevent Undine from acting, because as clichéd as it was to make threats while holding a small child over a shark tank, it worked.

At least it had worked until the brat bit her. She’d fumbled the kid and ended up falling into the shark tank where she learned that she should have done more research. The sharks didn’t attack in a frenzy of bloodlust like she’d expected, though both she and the kid got nudged around a bit while Nunzio tried to fight Undine on his own.

He hadn’t stood a chance and had ended up getting dropped, along with the Bio-Accelerator, into the pride of the research center, the world’s largest indoor coral reef.

Nunzio’s phone was one of those nearly indestructible, shockproof, waterproof models, but the Bio-Accelerator wasn’t and things had gone downhill from there.

Undine managed to pull her and the brat from the shark tank right in front of all the reporters and morons with cellphones there to record the party, getting live footage of Lilit humiliated as Undine launched into some overblown speech about crime not paying, the importance of protecting marine wildlife, the number to call if you found a hurt or stranded marine mammal or sea turtle and the marine research center’s visitor hours as well as the location of the souvenir shop. Lilit suspected that there was some funding deal involved given that last bit and the idea that she’d played straight into some stupid publicity stunt was mortifying.

The one bright spot in the whole miserable day was all the people with cameras managed to record _something_ garishly colored and spiny leap across the room and tackle Undine to the ground.

Hissing and snarling incoherently, it bit and clawed at Undine as the two rolled on the floor. The thing was large and irregularly formed and even now that Lilit had gotten a good look at what Nunzio had become she was still hard pressed to figure out how to describe him. Ugly was a start, but that wasn’t really fair since he’d never been handsome to begin with. The most noticeable thing about him was the colors, like Lisa Frank had decided she’d had enough of making school supplies for tween girls and wanted to try her hand at monsters. It was a shame really, because the colors were a distraction from the more menacing features that the thing that had been Nunzio possessed, like the mouths, _plural_. He had one in the standard location on his face, though the fangs and tentacles were new, giving him a kind of ‘Lovecraftian Acid-trip’ look. Dozens of other mouths dotted his body, complete with fangs and more tentacles. According to Nunzio he was pretty sure that he’d managed to use them to bite off a few of Undine’s fingers when they’d been fighting, something he wasn’t exactly proud of, but was a good enough sport to be amused by.

Then there was the matter of the tentacles, not the ones on his face, but the ones elsewhere on his body, the ones typically hidden by all the fins and frills.

Of course they were as brightly colored as the rest of him, and they weren’t the fun kind despite the shape of them. Lilit had learned that the technical term was cnidocytes and that he’d put them to good use during his fight with Undine. Of course that was the only thing that they were good for.

Another thing she learned about was palytoxin, which the slime oozing from Nunzio was apparently laced with.

At first she’d thought that there’d been a flu outbreak amongst her minions and had simply told those affected to take some time off and reemphasized the importance of handwashing and proper sterilization of laboratory equipment. There’d been a few deaths before she realized that there was a pattern to who was falling ill.

The victims had all been assigned to clean the oversized fish tank she’d had custom built for Nunzio when they discovered that he didn’t do very well out of the water for long periods of time. A few Google searches later and she’d figured things out.

Adding air filters to the masks she and her minions wore hadn’t been too much of an issue and the problem had been solved.

Mostly.

Nunzio had taken things well, or as well as one could upon ending up a carnivorous, insanely lethal amphibious monster.

His problem was that he needed something to do and he couldn’t return to his standard position as being the muscle looming behind her, shadowy and menacing in his mask and uniform. She had no idea where to find someone who could make an outfit that would fit him and it was necessary since his colors clashed badly with the purple, black and gold of her aesthetic. He was a great monster, still a loyal henchman, but there was more to a henchman than being hench and she had her image to worry about. She was a cold and sophisticated villainess, using her money and lethal wiles to get what she wanted, and yes, she would use monsters from time to time, but sleek and fearsome ones like sharks or snakes. Or demons during the one time she had teamed up with the Hecate Collective to steal artifacts from several different museums and archaeological dig sites in an attempt to…

She wasn’t actually sure what the Collective had been trying to do now that she thought about it. They were big on the notion of ‘evil for its own sake’ so they’d probably been trying to summon an underworld god or resurrect some ancient monster.

What it came down to was, she wasn’t sure what to do with a monster like Nunzio and Nunzio wasn’t sure what to do with himself.

Screams from down the hall brought a welcome distraction from her concerns. It sounded like the Kurtz dilemma was being solved.

She was curious, but hurrying to see what was happening would be unbecoming, especially if Kurtz was the one to survive. The cyborg had surprised her in the past and there was no telling what he might do if desperate enough, especially if he thought his life or a promotion was on the line.

By the time Lilit arrived the fight was over and Nunzio, to his credit wasn’t trying to offer excuses for what had happened. That was one of the many things she’d always liked about him, he never tried to explain away what he’d done, and there was no need to explain the mangled pile of mechanical limbs and organic body parts spread across the hall.

The level of violence wasn’t really unusual for Nunzio, though it was rare he went that far without a reason, “What did he say to start it?”

Nunzio hissed, fins flaring as he crossed his arms over his chest, “I figured something out.”

He tilted his head towards to several bone spines stuck into the walls. A number of them were buried in what was left of Kurtz as well. It was an interesting way to change the subject, but she wasn’t going to let Nunzio get away with it.

“We need to talk,” she tried a less direct approach. Then had been partners in crime for long enough that she could allow some leniency, especially in light of what had happened.

“About what?” Eyes, all eleven of them were fixed on her, tentacles around his mouth twitching excitedly, “A new plan? Because you’ve been sitting around fretting for too long.”

“Me, fretting?” Lilit was taken aback, “You’re the one who’s been stomping around, pissed off at the world.”

It was hard to tell, but she thought the look he was giving her was one of skepticism.

“Alright,” she rolled her eyes, “Maybe you’ve got a reason for it, but why take it out of Kurtz? You’ve never been one for random acts of violence.”

“He was talking shit.”

“That’s what he does,” Lilit retorted, not sure why she was allowing this argument to happen, “What did he say this time that you finally got sick of it?”

“The usual,” Nunzio shrugged, “Just didn’t want to hear anymore of it.”

“Is this because I was considering promoting him to take your place?” As soon as she said it she wished that she’d worded it differently. Most of her minions were expendable, but Nunzio was different, he’d been there from the start.

“No.”

His tone said otherwise, as did the way his fins lifted and his tentacles stretched out from beneath them.

“Alright, I’m not normally the kind to say this sort of thing, but sometimes no doesn’t actually mean no,” Lilit hoped that her attempt at humor wasn’t going to make things worse. She was good at wordplay and clever one-liners when bantering back and forth with a hero, but asking her to tell an actual joke or say something to try and lighten up a situation was asking for trouble, “Right now, that no sounds a lot more like yes.”

As expected her attempt at humor fell flat.

“It’s alright, I’ll get over it,” Nunzio turned and started walking away.

“Wait! Get over what?” Lilit started to try and grab him, but thought better of it. The toxin and stinging cells weren’t exactly something he could turn on and off, “And that wait was an order! You must obey me!”

And now she was sounding just like her dad, exactly the way he had when the AI he’d made with the intent to manipulate the stock market had gained a sense of self and turned on him, bankrupting his company with a single carefully inserted decimal point. It was the exact sort of thing you said when your monster was about to turn against you in the worst way possible.

Had he gone insane and was getting ready to attack her?

She didn’t think so. They’d worked together for long enough that she had a good enough idea of how to tell he’d decided that someone needed killing. He got a certain look in his eyes and started shifting his weight just-so, like he was getting ready to swing a punch. Right now that wasn’t happening, he was just standing there, waiting for her to say something, just like a loyal minion was supposed to.

Except with Nunzio there was more to it than that, he went listened to her plans out of respect rather than fear and he was one of the only people allowed to offer input on any of them.

They were a team, even if he was technically just her henchman and since the incident at the research center she’d abandoned her plans for disrupting the world’s shipping lanes and most of the other projects she’d been working on. It had put her off her stride and Nunzio wasn’t able to fill his usual position of reassuring her and helping her start her next scheme. Instead she’d decided to clean out some new projects, under the excuse of needing a larger holding tank for Nunzio until they figured out what to do with him.

And here she was, letting her mind wander while Nunzio continued to stare at her.

Now that she thought about it, Nunzio had been acting odd before the incident with the Bio-Accelerator. It had been a different sort of odd though, a nervous kind where talked turned to long term plots, looking at museum floor plans and security systems, whether she thought conflict diamonds were money well spent, and the possibility of setting up an island fortress somewhere out of the way and…

He had been awfully persistent about undermining the diamond market lately…

Asking if she thought volcanoes were a more dramatic backdrop for shocking revelations or if she preferred locations where onlookers could watch in horror more easily…

“Okay, I think I figured this out,” she leaned against the wall, careful to avoid any areas with viscera stuck to them, “That ring I found when we were cleaning your quarters out wasn’t a souvenir from our first heist together, was it? Back when we were just hitting jewelers and the occasional bank to mix things up?”

Nunzio tilted his head to the side, the tentacles on his face wiggling to conceal what had to be an embarrassed smile.

“I hadn’t figured out the details, but I was thinking things over, biding my time,” Nunzio dragged a foot along the floor, his claws leaving deep gouges, “Probably for the best, huh?”

“Yes, no, give me a minute,” Lilit struggled to process this new information, “Okay, we’ve got to figure things out, don’t we. I mean there’s a lot to work out. Like do we do this before or after we get you back to normal? And do we invite your family? Dad still thinks that you’re in the mafia and that your family has the grocery stores just for money laundering. Or do we not invite my family? Maybe that would be easier considering my sisters… And who officiates? Your family’s going to want it in a church, right? You’ve met my uncle, great guy, but I don’t know if he can go into a church without the risk of something spontaneously combusting. Doing it as a whole secret identity thing might be easier, but will people make the connection? Renowned business woman Jezebel Jarret gets married and then, right afterwards, Mistress Lilit has decided to team up with another villain. That’s how they figured out who the Scarlet Scolopendra was. Also, is it alright to have the bridesmaids dress in black? I look terrible in white. And wait, you do want to go back to normal, right? Because if not then buying that island gets a lot more urgent. It’s got to be tropical, right? I don’t do bright and sunny, but… And you don’t even have an alias, normally you’re just there brooding behind me and doing my bidding. If we’re officially a couple then you need an appropriately menacing name to strike dread into the hearts of our foes.”

Nunzio looked at her, shaking his head.

Lilit took a deep breath, “I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?”

“Yeah,” Nunzio smiled, showing off several rows of fangs, “How about we take things one step at a time and make things official first?”

“Sure,” Lilit wracked her brain, trying to remember if she’d given the ring back to Nunzio or kept it, “Now?”

“How about Undine’s funeral?” Nunzio chuckled, “Steal her show one last time and horrify a grieving public when I propose to you over her grave.”

“Undine’s dead!” Lilit gasped, “How did I miss that?”

Nunzio rolled his eyes, “And you accused me of sulking. Yeah, she’s dead. Waiting until then gives us time to figure out how to change me back to normal, if we can…”

Yes, that was a problem, “There might be a way…”

She winced at the mere thought of going to Echidna, but the witch had managed to strip more than one animal themed hero of their powers.

The tentacles on Nunzio’s face twitched, “Your sister?”

“Yes,” Lilit sighed, “It’s not like she wouldn’t find out anyway. I mean we’re probably going to have to invite her to the wedding, aren’t we?”

Nunzio shrugged.

That was a very good answer on his part.


End file.
